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Training your sales team is about more than teaching them how to make sales. It also is a great opportunity to teach them job specifics in the way you want them done. Whether you have a special tactics customized for your customer base or just a general set of best practices, sales training is the best way to integrate these core concepts into their daily work schedules. When you implement sales training, it’s not enough to simply have your team take a few courses. You’ll also want to have mechanisms in place to gauge the training’s effectiveness. There are a number of metrics you can look at to determine how successful your sales training is. Using these metrics to evaluate training has a number of positive effects, including:
- Helping you adjust training, if necessary, to give your sales team the knowledge and tools they need to thrive in their roles.
- Helping the existing team save time training new employees — the more comprehensive and engaging the training, the less time will be spent going over the concepts within the course.
- It will ultimately lead to more sales.
Let’s take a closer look at four ways you can track the success of your organization’s sales training.
1. Revenue Results
Obviously, the main goal of sales training is to give your sales team the knowledge they need to make more sales. To that end, the ultimate metric for determining the success of your sales training is the number and quality of sales your team makes overall. Your sales training is intended to equip your sales team with the information they need to identify prospects, engage them effectively, and ultimately close the sale. Your curriculum should reinforce your strategy and tactics, targeting several different parts of the selling process. Certainly, your sales team will bring their own personal expertise and experience to the table as well. But the overall success of your sales operations will depend on the tips, tricks, and processes you share with your team. Communicating them with your team is critical to ensuring uniform performance across your entire operation. If you implement a new LMS, first look to see how it’s affecting your team’s sales numbers. If there’s an uptick, it may mean you have the right training in place. If numbers stagnate or go down, you may need to take another look at what you’re teaching and adapt your content where necessary.
2. Employee Performance Reviews
The team’s sales results tell one side of the story. But individual employee performance reviews also help measure how successful the sales training is. While the team’s performance is valuable to help you assess your training, your team members aren’t robots. They each learn and perform differently. When you examine the individual performances of your team members, you’ll be able to see which ones benefited from your sales training the most when you track training. You’ll also get a better idea of any variations in performance across the team. For example, let’s say you have a veteran member of your team whose performance begins to lag before you implement a new sales training program. If their numbers begin to improve, you may be able to chalk that up to the improvements in your team’s training. Conversely, if new team members join and take an updated training course, but are being routinely outperformed by existing team members who took an older training course, you may need to adjust your material.
3. Sales Team Feedback
Numbers and stats are important in business. But you should also listen to what your employees are saying about the training system, to see how you can optimize it. You can gather this feedback in the form of surveys or other data points. The important thing is to press your team for their thoughts on the course. To help start the process, here’s a few questions that you could ask them:
- On [insert scale here], what was the difficulty of [name of course or training here]?
- Which parts of the sales training did you find the most engaging?
- What type of learning helps you retain information the best?
- Do you feel this course helped you? Comment below with honest feedback.
- Are there any more sales topics or lessons that you felt should have been added?
It isn’t the most scientific metric, but considering the user experience is imperative. You’ll want to have training that your team members enjoy and, most importantly, find valuable in learning the material.
4. Post-Training Evaluation
Does your sales training have some sort of evaluation in place to help determine how much information your team members actually learned during the training? This is where course content is processed and applied, usually taking the form of a test or quiz following the course. It will accurately reflect just how well they were able to retain the data. If your sales team members are consistently scoring below average on their post-training evaluation, there may be an issue with the content, the questions, or both. You can get a better handle on the specific problem when you ask your team for their thoughts.
Reevaluating How to Track Sales’ Success
In summary, there are four indicators you can look at to determine the effectiveness of your online sales training:
- Overall team sales
- Individual employee sales
- Feedback from your team
- Performance on post-training evaluation
On their own, none of these will tell the whole story. But you can examine them together as part of an integrated approach to determining the efficacy of your online courses. Rethink how you measure your sales training’s success and also, how you develop your sales training to begin with. At Knowledge Anywhere, we’re experts for advising on online training and eLearning. We can help you empower your team and prepare them for success. To learn more about how we can partner with you to create more effective sales training, schedule a meeting with us today.
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